Immigration, Weaponization, and Censorship

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the man man lucky enough to be the host and to talk twice a week with the star.

That is Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amarzabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where Victor is right this very moment, part of his annual doings at Hillsdale, where he will be giving lectures and the like.

Lucky you, Victor.

Lucky those who you lecture to.

Today, we've got the usual many issues we could talk about.

Let's start off today, Victor, talking about bouncing off a Wall Street Journal piece from this weekend's edition about the

deplorable state of U.S.

immigration courts.

We can talk more about immigration too, as you will.

And we'll get to all that, Victor, and more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I forgot to put this in the intro, Victor.

You know, you have a website, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

We'll talk a little more about that.

And sometimes I forget to add this at all in the show, but justthenews.com.

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Folks should check that out regularly, justthenews.com.

So, Victor, I am

looking at a Wall Street Journal piece from this weekend.

Clogged courts worsen

U.S.

immigration crisis.

Millions of migrants are raising their American children and settling into work lives without knowing if they will be allowed to stay.

So it starts off.

this piece starts off with the story about a family that is

this guy illegal here illegally, but according to the 1983 law, you can stay and then be adjudicated.

He's been waiting 10 years for his case to be settled.

There gives an example here of the Omaha Immigration Court, where there are three judges overseeing 32,000 cases that have been undecided, average of almost three years.

And for migrants requesting asylum, the average wait is nearly six years.

Victor, we have, of course, a crazy problem of

invasion at the border, which, as you've said before, we don't have a border anymore.

But then we have this parallel insanity of adjudication of those.

And it just,

well,

should we be surprised?

This is the way government works.

Victor, your thoughts on any of this?

Well,

the whole logic of illegal emigration, we know what it is.

It's under Biden, 8 million illegal entries.

So then we always say, well,

they're entries.

What does that mean?

It means that people broke the law when they came in.

They broke the law subsequently to stay in.

And they broke the law a third time to get identification to justify one and two.

Then what do you do with those people?

Well, they slowly acculturate to the American landscape.

And it's two, three years, four years, six years, eight years.

And then if you come in and you say,

your parents came in illegally, they are here illegally.

That's not fair to people who came legally.

Then the whole machinery of the left says that you're trying to send people back to Mexico, which you are.

But the kids, then, because of our birthright statutes, are citizens.

So then you break the family apart.

And so what do you do?

And so my point is, the whole logic of illegal immigration is just to get to the United States, and then the machinery of the left therapeutic culture will ensure that you're never deported.

That said, Jack.

The only thing that's going to stop the border if you don't finish the wall is deterrence, and deterrence is predicated on what?

Deportation.

I always mention that famous quip of Voltaire

about Admiral Bing, who was hanged

for supposedly not sufficient martial valor.

He said every once in a while the British hang an admiral for encourage

l'autre, you know, to encourage the others.

And that was what you would need to do.

I don't mean hang, but all you'd have to do is deport a thousand people.

And that would send the fear of God to people and say, we're not going to go in the United States because you're going to get deported because it's against the law, just like Mexico does with people coming across the border with Guatemala.

But if you don't do that, then you end up to this morass where

you're the victimizer by enforcing the law.

And that's what it's all about.

So the longer a person stays in the United States illegally, they have family, they make connections.

And then if you decide with a new administration that you're going to deport all the people who knowingly broke the law, then you're going to have CNN and MSNBC and ABC with

family shots of a home where an ICE guy walks on the door and people are screaming and crying and hiding under bed and he's yanking them out.

And then we're going, New York Times headlines, you're off to the races.

And that's the idea, isn't it?

Nobody ever takes a picture of a guy in India that goes through seven different bureaucratic consul offices and he's waiting there and waiting and waiting for seven or eight years to come legally.

Nobody cares about him.

Yeah,

it's just madness.

I don't know who has the will, who will have the will and stomach to

fix it and fix it, as you say, means taking, throwing people out of the country and throwing millions of people out of the country seems what will be needed

sooner or later.

As late as

I can tell you, as late as

19, before Simpson-Mazzoli, the big watershed moment was the Simpson-Missouli Act of 1986.

Prior to that, you had something which illegal aliens knew as La Mégra, but that was the migration service, and they had green vans, and they would just travel all around the southwest United States.

And when they saw somebody that they had

profiled, as remember Barack Obama said, you can go out and have ice cream and they'll profile you

but they did deport I've seen people being physically deported and when I was growing up and people

it really cut down on the illegal immigration

and that's well you mentioned people Cesar Chavez was one of the proponents of that right oh yeah Cesar Chavez

sent members of the United Farm Workers with clubs down to the border to physically attack people who came across the border because they were he said they were scabs.

Farmers were using them as strikebreakers.

And he used a whole vocabulary of disparagement against illegal aliens.

And his idea was a static Mexican-American legal population that had clout and would be a traditional union.

And

remember one thing that

illegal immigration could not exist without the compliance of the right, of the corporate right.

They're the people who like in mostly in pack, agriculture only accounts for 20% of all illegal immigration now, but mostly it's in meat packing,

hospitality, if you can use that term for hotel maids and cooks, landscaping.

Agriculture as well, but that's where it is, service industries and personal attendance.

If you go through Atherton or Menlo Park or any of these wealthy areas in Silicon Valley, you will see

thousands of poor people who are sleeping on El Camino Real in Winnebagos that are rented out to people.

And then during the day, they cut grass, they cook food, they clean houses, they care for elderly people.

And a vast majority of them are not legal.

And then they come back and they sleep in Winnebago during the week, and then they go home to Salinas or somewhere close or Gilroy or Watsonville during the week.

And that's okay, apparently.

Yeah, Winnebago life.

Hey, Victor,

the answer may be no, but I have a feeling you have met Simpson of Simpson-Mazzoli.

And if you have, has the issue of his great achievement here ever come up?

I know Alan Simpson very well.

He's in his 90s.

I like him a great deal.

I see him quite frequently.

Yeah, we had a little informal debate at one occasion, and he was very polite about it.

I just said that

in his defense, I don't think he envisioned that

Simpson Mazzoli.

Mazzoli was a Democrat.

Simpson was a Republican in the Senate.

The idea was that they were both going to come together and solve for good the illegal immigration.

And they were going to give amnesties amnesties for people who were here illegally.

And then everybody was going to have to have an I-9 form.

And the employer was going to be the arbiter and enforcer.

And

they were going to pull back from the border.

Well,

if you remember, what happened is everybody was flooded with I-9 forms.

Every farmer had them.

The university had them.

Everybody had them.

And they were all, not all, but many of them were phony.

And

all these people came with social security numbers.

I know when we were farming, my brother was doing all the books, and half of the I-9 form social security numbers would come back, and the addresses were non-existent.

So people just gave you fraudulent information.

And the employer was supposed to be the FBI.

It was a joke.

And it was a complete disaster.

Reagan got that through.

Actually,

that was actually from the employers wanted that.

And what it did was it took all the La Migra vans out of the landscape and they were not there anymore.

And there was no border enforcement and there was no deportation.

It was all done administratively.

So the theory was that somebody crosses the border illegally, they're caught

because they didn't have an I-9 form, and then the employer sends that in to a bureaucratic office as an incomplete, or somebody didn't have it, and then they administratively deport that person just think about that with seven alias names it was a joke victor let's you know we

oh

we've really rarely talked about the jurisprudence related to january the the 6th um

and julie kelly who's a friend of both of ours julie's now

writing on Substack.

She had been writing for American Greatness for a while.

Prior to that, she had written for a while a National Review, Political, also Science.

She's very good on

skullduggery and the sciences.

But she's been

the person focusing on what's happened in the court, the courts in Washington

for the folks who've been arrested related to January 6th.

And she has a piece on her sub stack.

It's titled Florida Grandma's

Obstructionists and Fence Shakers: America's New Terrorists.

And this is a case of one person named Connie Meggs, and she's been sentenced by Judge Ahmed Mehta Mehta.

He's one of the federal judges overseeing these cases.

And Connie Meggs was married to an oathkeeper.

She was in the Capitol for 20 minutes, did not engage in any violence,

but nevertheless was arrested after.

I think she's from Florida.

So

she's already spent 45 days in a Florida jail and she was denied release after her February 2021 arrest.

That was followed, though, by two and a half years

on home detention wearing an ankle monitor.

And I'll be finished in a second here, folks.

So that

she,

at her sentencing,

she read a lengthy letter of apology.

She sobbed.

She said

she,

according to Julie, angrily blamed her husband for choosing the oath keepers over their family.

She says, I'm a good person.

Megs told Meta as her son and grandchildren broke down in the gallery.

Please don't take their mother and grandmother away from them.

But the judge

who seems to be,

this is the point I'm stressing here, the overly punitive nature of many of these prison sentences.

The Department of Justice still wanted this lady put away for 10 years, and the judge said no, but then he still said that she was part of this broader context.

If she wouldn't have been there, then this terrible event, which I'm not in his words, but essentially one of the most calamitous events in American history changed the fabric of America.

This is the judge said, too bad, you're going to have to go away anyway, and sentencing her to an additional 15 months in jail.

So, grandmother walked in the Capitol, 20 minutes,

no violence.

Not saying that anyone who broke a law, Victor, shouldn't have to

pay whatever, but this seems excessive, as do many of these sentences.

Yeah, I mean, so what you're talking about is grandmother goes in the Capitol on January 6th.

She shouldn't have done that.

She walks around peacefully for 15,

20 minutes, and now she's

after being in jail for how many days?

45 days?

45 days jail, two and a half years home arrest, ankle.

And she's got

two and a half home, yeah, two and a half years home arrest with ankle.

Now she's got another 15 months.

And we've got

in 2020, we have 120 days of continual riot and insurrection, $2 billion in property damage, 35 to 40 people killed, 1,500 police officers injured.

And as far as iconic buildings that were violated, a police precinct was tried to, they tried to torch it with a police inside.

A federal house courthouse was attacked and torched.

They torched the historic St.

John's Episcopal Church across from the White House.

They tried to storm the White House grounds and sent Trump and his family, at at least his wife and son into a bunker

all of the almost all of those 14 000 arrests were dismissed because that was for a higher cause we had kamala harris promising to bail out people remember that and then she was on cnn and she said these riots will not stop nor should they stop they're going to go all the way to election day and then you had molly

Ball in Time magazine when she had, you know, the cabal and the conspiracy bragging about how the left outsmarted the right and they used Silicon Valley money, they got corporate.

And one of the modulations they used,

she said, they were able to talk to Antifa and BLM and up,

I guess, accelerate or decelerate the protest depending on the political necessity.

And then she said, if Joe Biden had lost, they were ready to ramp it up on the street.

Okay, keep all that in mind.

And this grandmother now is going to be in jail for 15 months.

And did she torch anything?

Did she break anything?

No, she committed a likely misdemeanor.

That is she walked through an open door into the Capitol.

And we talked about Ashley Babbitt, 14-year military veteran, goes through a broken window.

She shouldn't have done that.

And she's executed or she's shot while on arm by an officer who

identification is not released for six months, essentially.

And then we're told that five other people, police officers, died on January 6th because Joe Biden counts people who in the next nine months committed suicide for various reasons as victims.

And then we got the lie about Officer Sicknick that was killed violently.

He died the next day of the stroke.

And the only person who died on January 6th was a 105-pound 14-year-old millivary victim for the crime of entering a broken window.

And we had another protester that may or may not have been killed by the rush of people or who knows.

But of the five people that were dead, all but one was Trump supporters.

And then we were called an insurrection.

I've never heard of an insurrection where people go inside the Capitol and they can't find one firearm in any of the people they arrested.

They found some people

that had a firearm in their car locked away.

But on any given day, if you go through Washington, you round up 100 people, you're going to find some firearm.

But they didn't in the Capitol.

And so they, and then they militarized it for the next

60 days with 20 to 30,000 military officers.

That was the most,

that was the biggest military buildup in Washington, as I said, since 1864, when Jubile Early, the Confederate cavalry commander, almost stormed into Washington.

So what was the purpose of all?

It was all performance art.

Should they have done it?

No, but they wanted to really get as much political mileage as they could.

So then you have the DC jury system that's 95% left and the judicial system.

And they love taking these people, these MAGA people, primarily from rural America, primarily from the Middle West.

And they have these show trials where they humiliate them and say, you did this and you're an insurrectionary.

And then they have them do these public confessionals.

I didn't know what I was doing.

Proud boys, oath keepers made me do it.

And they humiliate them and then they put them in jail for a year rather than, as you said, you know, threatening them with 10 years.

Meanwhile, also making them putting them on, making them official terrorists for the rest of their life.

They call them terrorists.

They have to be port as terrorists.

They don't know if they'll be able to fly.

And then it's sort of like a Soviet

trial.

Meanwhile,

in the streets of Washington, people are walking,

being assaulted with a knockout game.

They're being smashed and grabbed.

They're being carjacked.

and those people are sometimes out on bail the same day.

There's no bail.

And so at some point you look at this asymmetry and it gets

whether it's the asymmetry in rioting or insurrection or looting.

So does anybody in America think that this grandmother who walked around the Capitol because the doors were open and walked around is going to is a greater threat to society for 15 months in jail than somebody that goes to Nordstrom

with a whole swarm and steals, steals, steals, and destroys stuff?

No.

And that's the stuff that gets people angry incrementally and insidiously if you keep doing that to people.

And the justice system is two-tiered.

And we used to use that term to say it was for

wealthy white people who were connected and they didn't have to pay the price.

Is that still true?

Absolutely.

That's Hunter Biden, right?

But there's a bookend to Hunter Biden, and that is

it's prejudicial to the deplorables, the irredeemables, the chumps, the drags, the clingers, the people of the white working class that have no

rubric, no cachet,

no name.

And so they fit that stereotype of the bicostal left, and they unleash the whole powers of the judicial system against them.

And there's nothing you can do really with that.

Yeah, unless you, you know, you, you can't

email the pseudonym of the vice president of the United States.

Yeah, you don't have the special access.

So here you have the vice president's son,

and he did not pay taxes on millions of dollars.

He has a video where he's committing felonies that range from solicitation of prostitution to probably, you could say, racketeering, talking about income going to to pay the Biden family's utility bills.

He's feloniously using crack cocaine, and he's never been charged.

He illegally registered a firearm and then it found out in a dumpster.

He lost his crack pipe in a rental car.

He lost his laptop,

nothing.

And they're going to put a grandmother for 15 months for parading around.

And so it's called deterrence.

They want to make the statement that if you ever, ever try to emulate our tactics, and what did I mean by that?

They're really saying

rioting, demonstrating, that's what we do on the left, and that brings social change.

And when you people try to emulate our tactics, we're going to pay a big price.

We're the rioters, we're the looters, we're the arsonists, not you guys.

And so they go after these people.

They like doing it.

The older a person is the more grandchildren she has the less violent acts she commits the more she's in jeopardy and that sends a message right right look what we did to her imagine what we'll do to you

if they say we don't care look what we did to a grandmother what do you think we're going to do to you and believe me they'll never they won't have anybody wanting to demonstrate anywhere near the capital because they'll end up destroyed we're not even talking about the people who

uh of all these thousands of arrests plea plea bargained and some of the plea bargains they can never fly on a plane again and they can't do they're ruined and

so that's what they what they do it's not like this grandmother went into downtown washington and that free place and then carved out

you know, an area of downtown Washington, D.C.

right outside the St.

Regent's hotel and said, this is my property.

I'm taking it over from the city.

And then the city said, Oh, that's so wonderful.

And we're going to make it institutionalize that by making a kind of monument, which they did.

Or the Chaz or

parcel in downtown Seattle.

But the same,

keep pushing the envelope.

I don't know where it all ends.

They keep trying to

accelerate the

asymmetry.

The same Justice Department that one of this lady put away for 10 years, that's what they had requested, is the same justice department that wanted to and ruin her life

the same justice department want to let hunter biden off with i don't even know if you call it spanking and uh he should be in jail anyone else would have been in jail just for the gun the gun charge no it's uh

That's not remarkable.

It's America today.

Every listener today should remember, if you take a federal,

if you want to buy a gun and you lie on a federal affidavit, they'll come after you.

Or if you take a picture of yourself smoking crack, you're going to come after you.

Or you hire a Ukrainian prostitute and you pay her $10,000, they're going to come after you.

Or you

don't report several million dollars in income, they're not going to talk to you.

They're just going to show up at your house armed and say, you owe us this.

Yeah, at six in the morning, kicking in the door is why kids cry.

Yeah.

Well, that's sorry.

That's reserved reserved for pro-lifers.

And what's really bad about all this, and then we go around, we go all over the world and give these sanctimonious lectures about how we're morally superior to all these other societies because we follow the rule of law.

We're transparent.

We have

equal application of justice.

This is all new.

I mean, there were elements in American history where they did stuff like this, but this started under Obama when he politicized the DOJ

and the left saw that they could gain political traction outside of elections by weaponizing the administrative state, CIA, FBI.

And it was all based on a principle of asymmetry.

James Clapper, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe lying under oath, no consequences,

that kind of stuff.

Or coming to Ferguson,

where Michael

Brown was

killed,

but he was killed in an act of self-defense by a cop.

And now, you know, it's a terrible victim.

I can't remember the name of the damn Attorney General at the time, but he came in there anyway.

We're going to find something.

Eric Holder.

Yeah, Holder.

Yeah.

And

Malma's Wingman, remember?

Yeah.

Malma's Wingman.

And they ran a federal investigation and they found nothing.

Right.

Nothing.

And they were very disappointed.

And then we we had the CNN whole anchor team walk out on the air with their hands chanting, hands up, don't shoot.

That was a complete myth.

No one ever, even

Michael Brown, I mean, nobody around him knew, said that he said that.

That was all based on one lying witness who

was trying to excuse his own behavior.

So we never think about any of these things.

Michael Brown was a very large person who went into a 7-Eleven 7-Eleven and held it up and took things and then was smoking marijuana in the middle of the street.

The police called.

The police didn't profile him.

They didn't want anything to do with him.

They called the police.

He went over there to apprehend a very large suspect that had reported Lee just stole from a shopkeeper.

He asked him

to stop.

and he was going to investigate him and Michael Brown charged him and they had a fight over the gun.

He tried to get the gun.

And then

he

ran away.

And then he turned around and charged him.

And he shot him.

He didn't shoot him in the back.

And that became mythology one of racist, systematically

prejudicial America.

And then

that view is sanctified by Eric Holder in his investigation that found nothing but had to come out of it with something, right?

Well,

that's what they came out of.

You have to be spotless.

if Eric Colder has a federal investigation to to railroad you and he can't and then we had Michael and then we had George Floyd it was very tragic but George Floyd was a queer felon he'd been arrested for such things as putting a gun to a pregnant woman's belly and a home invasion he'd been pulled over for fentanyl had a long record And he was going into a store passing counterfeit bills.

The police didn't want to go there.

They didn't stereotype him.

They weren't weren't stopping him.

They were called.

They went over there.

He was very large and they tried to arrest him or talk to him.

He resisted arrest.

If you and I were pulled over by a policeman and we started swinging at him or pushing them, they would get violent.

And they did.

They tried to push him in the car, but he was high on fentanyl to a degree of near fatality.

And they couldn't subdue him, so they called another supposedly expert officer, Shalvin, who put his knee on his neck and we were off to

George Floyd with angel wings and a halo on a mural in Afghanistan of all places.

It was everywhere.

Yeah.

George Floyd.

So nobody ever talked about the circumstances of which triggered all of these things.

Nobody ever does.

So George Floyd, if he hadn't taken fentanyl, he wouldn't have been there.

If he hadn't have tried to counter to

pass counterfeit bills, he wouldn't have been in that situation.

If he had not resisted arrest, he wouldn't wouldn't have been in that situation.

But if you walk through the Capitol for 10 minutes, you walk through the Capitol,

you're in big trouble.

So that

is

nobody wants to talk about it.

It's a taboo subject, just like,

well, I said that the other day, and I think it was very controversial.

But when you look at the videos of the smash and grab at Nordstrom's in Torrens or Emeryville.

It's primarily black teens,

primarily males, but not all.

In California, the black population, we know this because of the repertory committee that's trying to get reparations, which is itself a disconnect.

So here you're trying to get reparations from a state that was never slave, had no Jim Crow.

and is multiracial, and 27% of the population was not born in the United States, and yet you're going to hold them accountable, even though you haven't been a slave.

And your

so-called people, I only use that term because everybody uses a collective now on the left, but your people have not been a slave in sixth generation, nor can you find anybody in California that was ever a slave owner.

But if you could, it would be six generations ago.

And why all this is happening, a demographic that makes up about 1% of the population, that would be black young males of the 3%

of blacks that inhabit, reside in California.

So it's probably about 1%

are committing these violent crimes

at numbers that are six, seven, eight times their demographic.

And no one is talking about it.

Not the Reparations Committee, nobody.

And the Reparations Committee is self-appointed that they're the spokesman.

for the entire black community of California.

If they want to take in that role, it's a double-edged role.

Maybe there should be a small business reparations committee.

I don't know.

But if

I

was, if I was stupid enough to say that I speak for white people,

then I'm going to have to defend

the criminality in Silicon Con Valley.

So I'm not going to do that.

And so, but once you become a spokesman collectively and you just erase from the equation individual behavior, but it's all collective behavior, then you're responsible.

And so

that's the story.

And no one wants to talk about that.

How can you be talking about reparations

when the people that you include in your collective are committing violent crimes at an astonishing rate at six to seven to eight times their numbers in the general population?

No one's doing anything about it.

And then if it's not a legal matter or it's not a moral matter, it's a practical matter.

How are you going to convince the state of California when a shopkeeper in Nordstrom is terrified when 50 young black males come in and loot the store, and they have done that four or five times in other locations,

and then you turn on the television and their representatives say that

you, the taxpayer, owe each of us a million dollars.

It's not a practical argument.

It's not going to work.

And that's the tragedy of it.

And so more people have to speak up about that.

Victor, I think the last last person born in slavery and born as a child died in, I'm looking this up right now, Peter Mills, who died in Maryland in 1972,

age of 100 and roughly 110, is a far cry for people to make a claim on what Peter Mills went through, that they should have a couple million bucks put in their pockets.

Talk about reparations, the arguments are so

bizarre.

I mean, yeah you got 27 of the population of california wasn't even here right

and

uh

california had that fight when it got statehood and

and it was that discussion during the gold rush 1849 and 50 there were southerners who came to california hoping that they could persuade the powers that be to join as a slave state and it had no traction at all.

It was very clear from the beginning it was going to be a northern United affiliated state.

Right.

And

there was no Jim Crow.

We talked about there were zoning laws, but that was applicable to everybody.

And California, you know, we had the Zoo Suits riots, we had the Japanese internment, we had zoning codes against Armenians.

So the dominant population, which in those days were 90% white, do what all dominant populations do.

They become tribal, but that ended.

And that was the process of self-critique in the united states yeah so it's just not it's it's not going to work and uh the more that it's pushed the

the more that this reparations is pushed or the more there's asymmetry in the application of justice the less people have confidence in the law and uh

well victor this is the subtext by the way uh that i want to be careful what i say this is the subtext of the whole trump indictments Right.

That

Fannie Ellis in Atlanta and

Alvin Bragg in New York and Letita James in New York and Jack Smith in Miami assumes that they are going to indict Donald Trump and there's going to be a largely marginalized quote-unquote people jury, that is non-white juries that are going to be appealed to in racial terms, subtext at least will be, and they're going to be far left, and therefore they think they can use these juries.

It would be as if Donald Trump were,

it would be as if,

let's say, Joe Biden, a local prosecutor, wants to go after Hunter Biden and says, well, he went, he had a wire transfer in West Virginia.

Oh, you know what?

He stayed in Utah for a while.

And, you know, he had a home for a while in Wyoming.

So we're going to get a local Wyoming, Utah, and West Virginia prosecutor to go after Hunter Biden.

And we're going to get the juries that represent those states, both ideologically and tribally.

And what would the left say about that?

Because they would convict Hunter Biden in two seconds, and Joe Biden probably two.

And then they would say,

he was not tried by a jury of his peers.

They were not.

sufficiently diverse ideologically, politically, racially, ethnically.

Well, that's the whole point.

They're not supposed to be in the case of Trump.

Well, Victor, we have another topic or two together.

One last little quote to that.

And then Josh doesn't help himself, does he?

What does he say?

He says that

Danny Ellis is racist.

Albert Regg is racist.

No, Donald, it's more than that.

It's the whole system is geared against you, but when you call somebody racist, you're not doing due justice to the challenge that you face.

It's worse than that.

It's systematically rigged, but when you say racist, then you get the headlines as being crazy.

Right.

Where he could say, I'm facing an entire bureaucracy of injustice.

And it starts with the prosecutor.

It starts with the jail.

It starts with the jury selection.

It starts with the judge.

And it has elements of ideological, political.

Sure.

It starts with George Soros, a lot of this.

You know, he's not black last I look.

So yeah.

All right, Victor,

there's some interesting articles out there about censorship and like to get your views on that when we return from these important messages.

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Victor, our friends, good folks at Real Clear Politics, love Real Clear Politics, is a piece by

Peter McGinnis.

It's titled The Censorship Industrial Complex.

And here's how it begins.

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex.

It's rather like the old military industrial complex,

which was shorthand for the military private companies in academia working together to achieve U.S.

battlefield dominance with the RD funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers.

The players aren't Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes.

The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

Victor,

this has a one, it's called the Who is Participating in This Complex?

It's like some actual freaking

gathering.

It's the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

And there are all kinds of players there, tech Silicon Valley folks, folks who in their private lives or through their own social media platforms have attacked free speech and called for censoring Americans.

But here they are, all one big pot of stew that seeks to shut you and me up.

Victor, your thoughts?

Well, remember, you're talking about the left at censorships.

This was very strange.

I was interested in this with the ACLU because it was this liberal protector, supposedly of the First Amendment, for years.

And I went back and looked their website.

You know what they're doing now?

They're having special train sessions for diversity, equity, and inclusion,

young

activists, not on free speech at all, because what they've done is that any speech they disagree with is hate speech

or it's disinformation or it's misinformation.

Therefore, there's no rules about protecting it.

And so, when you talk about this nexus between government,

it's Mark Zuckerberg, is really all he says is that he was involved with the FBI during the 2020 election.

So, we don't have the whole details like we do with Twitter, where they paid $3 million to hire them as a private contractor

to

censor the news.

Remember, 11 FBI agents were on assignment at Twitter to go through the news.

Twitter itself wasn't saying that we're going to suppress news that the vaccination had deleterious side effects on particular age groups or that

Hunter Biden's laptop was

genuine.

That came from the FBI.

The FBI had that laptop, to take an example.

They had it for a year, and they knew it was genuine, and they knew it was incriminating, and they knew the left wanted, i.e., their boss, the left, and Joe Biden was running for office, and he was going to come on

an upcoming debate.

He was going to be asked by it.

So they got Anthony Blinken called Mike Morrell, the CIA.

He got 51 people to say that it was rushing disinformation.

That's what Joe Biden said in the debate.

And these are just not academic matters.

There was a poll, albeit a conservative one, that people said that made a change in their vote.

So you had 11 FBI agents, and then they all rotate into Twitter and Facebook when they retire.

So

the question I don't quite understand is

there is a culture at the FBI and the CIA and the DOJ

and the IRS, and it's right below the political appointees.

And we focus on the political appointees, but the foot soldiers, when did they become so progressively left-wing?

Are they just emulating their superiors that get in there?

But they're all left-wing agencies now.

They're in the business of working with Silicon Valley, where all the money is, because they think they're going to retire or get jobs there, of suppressing any speech that Silicon Valley

doesn't want.

And sometimes it's in the theater observe.

So if you say that Hunter Laptop

is

disinformation, what does that really mean?

That

the New York Post transcripts of the laptop or the laptop repairman who has it and the FBI, what does it mean?

It means this,

that a bunch of Russians

created a laptop.

They had a spy, maybe a Ukrainian prostitute or something, and she took a picture of that laptop.

They took it back to the, to to Moscow.

They got one just like it.

And then they doctored all these pictures of Hunter and they put them on it.

And then they were so clever.

They knew about Tony Bobolinsky.

They knew the names of all the Biden people.

And they created a whole

volume or corpus of emails.

And they did it so well that when Hunter was asked,

he wouldn't say yes or no because they were such great forgers that Hunter himself didn't know.

That's what they ask us to believe right before the election, the FBI and by association, you know,

the left, and it was absurd.

And yet people believed it and it made a difference.

So

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand what the purpose is.

You got all of these people that go into these agencies and apparently most of them are apolitical, but they see that

the hierarchy, the Robert Muellers, the James Comeys, the Andrew McCabe's, the John Brennan's, the James Clappers, the Anthony Fauci's, the Francis Collins, they're all sort of

left-wing apparatus.

And then they make the necessary adjustments for promotion and they get acculturated into that.

And then part of that cargo is that you're going to censor speech or fire people who say things

that are against the narrative.

And what is the narrative?

What's the common theme between the vaccinations and the laptop or Russian collusion?

It's whatever narrative a particular ideology thinks is very important.

Right.

Victor, if I may, I'm more fearful for these agencies you just listed.

And you've talked at length, other podcasts about the military, where

clearly the four stars and the generals, et cetera, have so bought in for career purposes, get that pot of gold at the end that they play these woke games, gave a lot of

trust still in some of the lower ranks.

But relative, comparing, maybe it's unfair to compare the military to these agencies, but I just get the sense that the agencies are much more, it's

part of the culture.

You're not getting someone to go in there to be

a patriot.

Like the old days when the FBI was filled with guys from the point that a person who is a young hipster.

thinks,

well,

I want to get into the FBI or I want to get in the DOJ or I want to get in the CIA or I want to go to the National Intelli,

the NSA or whatever, because I have been taught by my history political science professor.

The United States is bad.

Are Hillsdale graduates going to want to go to the FBI?

You know, I can see them.

They also want to go to the FBI, but would they like to go to the new FBI?

I've had a lot of former students of various ideologies that work for the FBI.

I don't know what their politics now are, but it used to be that conservative students wanted to because they felt they were patriotic organizations.

That's what's very funny, though, now is how they left, took over these institutions.

We understood they took over K through 12, academia, professional sports, entertainment, foundations, but we didn't really think they took over these

other law enforcements, which they hated, they despised.

You know, they turned off the TV in the 60s when the FBI came on Sunday nights.

They hated the Pentagon.

Every cartoon they did was a fat Pentagon.

So why did they, when they got over it, why did they, how did they take them over?

And

I think it was because they realized that if you really wanted power in this country, then you have to go with people who have the guns and those are the security, the intelligence, and the military organizations.

And one of the ways they took them over is they gave them in Congress the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, the Bernie Sanders of the world.

They used to go after those generals.

They went after FBI people.

They

hunted out conflicts of interest.

If you were a four-star general

and

you went and worked for Lockheed when you retired and then you came back and you wanted a civilian post, they just grilled the hell out of you.

You were part of big military profiteering.

And now, if you

go before Congress and they look at your resume and you were stalwart in your promotion of diversity, equity, inclusion, or you can say that when you had a brigade commander and you promoted five transgendered soldiers or whatever it is, they're going to give you a complete pass on profiteering.

If you're known as an officer of the left, when you go back to

the private sector, so you get this Orwellian, this is Orwellian, and that is you get somebody like Lloyd Austin,

who

went out of the military and made millions as a Raytheon lobbyist dash board member.

And then during the woke period, he comes back in as defense secretary and he starts grilling people or,

I don't know, parading, virtue signaling in congressional testimony that he's out to find white rage, white supremacy, white privilege.

And then we know that he's going to go back to Raytheon when he gets done.

And the subtext is that he's left-wing and he's woke.

So the corporations are too.

And that's

what's necessary to do.

And we know Mark Milley will do the thing.

The things that really bother Americans, like Mark Milley calling up his Chinese counterpart in the People's Liberation Army and saying, you know, my commander-in-chief is crazy.

If we ever get into a nuclear escalatory moment, I will inform you first that I will probably disobey an order.

Well, that is a record, that's just a perfect recommendation to go up to Northrop or General Dynamics when he gets out.

So

when that is known to generals or FBI people who want to go into Silicon Valley, how are you going to react when you're in your last years?

If you're James Comey,

he was a head counsel in between federal jobs for Lockheed.

But when he goes out, is he going to follow the law and be dubbed a boring FBI conservative?

No.

He's going to be known as the guy that let Hillary erase 30,000 emails.

Or he's going to be the guy who worked with Twitter to censor the laptop or Andrew McCabe.

And that means they're going to end up on CNN with consultantships.

They're going to be into Silicon Valley board membership, that kind of stuff.

They know that.

And so if Republicans,

conservatives want to take back the culture,

they have a real moral question.

And that is, do they emulate the tactics of the people who stole those institutions?

Or do they just dismantle them and start over again?

And that's

a larger question that we've asked before is

when you take power, are you going to say,

we play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules and we're not ever going to politicize the system the way they did?

Are you going to say, you know what, I'm not done with the Bidens and they're all guilty of extortion and bribery and in some ways treason.

I'm going to try the SOBs even when they're a private citizen, if nothing other than to show you that you tried an ex-president when he was a citizen.

And then the left will say, well, if we do that, we're going to be in tit for tat and we're a third world country yes you started it right

and so that's hard to know whether you're going to be new testament or old testament right restore a balance or back to normal well where you are right now victor and let's accept that much of this madness that's in America has emanated from universities and the universities themselves have been

the march through the institution of the universities has been you know 80 80 years, 90 years.

Bill Buckley wrote God Manny Yale

70 plus years ago.

So this is nothing new.

But

do you build the new university?

Do you build more Hillsdales?

Or do you like look at what DeSantis is doing in Florida with that new college, but the energy, et cetera, that it takes to

rebuild it.

You can have a new college in Florida.

You can have a University of Austin.

You can have another Hillsdale campus.

You can make all of these conservative alternatives.

But

what it means is that all those centuries of well-meaning people,

and they were well-meaning.

I remember when I was a student at Stanford, it was liberal, yes.

But in the classics department, we had European philologists.

And I probably was the only conservative there, but they used to kid about it.

But they never, ever used that against me.

Right.

And they were professionals.

And I think the universities were that way.

So now the question is, do you just turn over the Rockefeller foundation?

You think the Rockefeller or the Ford Foundation, they dwarf, as I said earlier, conservative.

You think we just turn them over and we make new ones?

Or who said that's theirs?

Right.

We had this

Judge Duncan shouted down the law school, right?

Right.

And the

protesters had signs like, I hope your daughters are raped.

So do you just say, you know what, they took over Stanford and Sam, the Bankman Freeds took over, and it's lost.

So, I'm going to, I'm never going to go to those places.

Well, who the hell said it's their university?

It's just their university because they happened to be there for four years.

The people who built the university, we don't think of their heritage.

The alumni who give it, they don't own the university.

The taxpayers who give them $37 billion in tax-exempt legislation, they don't pay taxes, they don't have a say.

The federal government that gives them $2 billion a year in federal grants and guaranteed loans don't have a say.

Who said it's their universities at this time and place?

It's not.

So I think they're not incompatible.

We need Hillsdale.

We need all of these other institutions as models.

But we also need each according to their station at these other universities and foundations to say, wait a minute, it's not yours.

You hijacked it.

You're contrary to the mission statement of the foundation or university or the donor intent.

We're not going to allow it.

And they have to fight for it.

Break your loins, folks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So don't give up on them.

Yeah.

And if you, and

there's ways to fight.

I think one of the ways is if you get a Republican president and a Republican Senate and a Republican House, the Department of Education should call all these grandees in from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and say, look,

you don't follow the Bill of Rights.

You don't allow free speech.

You have segregated dorms, which is contrary to the Constitution, Civil Rights Act of 1964.

You have segregated theme houses.

You have segregated graduations.

You have segregated safe spaces.

You don't give due process to students when they're accused of sexual harassment.

Okay, and you have admissions policies that are contrary to the Constitution because you're using using race as an exclusionary criteria.

So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to give you six months.

And when we meet next time in session, we're going to do the following.

We're going to start taxing all of your endowments, all of them.

So if you're Stanford and you have $37 billion

and you're getting $2.5 billion that pays maybe 40% of your budget.

I'm sorry, but you're going to have to give half of that $2.5 million back to us.

And then they're not going to have enough money for the diversity, equity, inclusion 88 czars or the 15,000 administrative staff they have that's almost as large as their total student body graduate and undergraduate.

And then you're going to tell them, in addition to that,

we're not going to give you any

federally backed student loans.

We know you don't really need them because you don't allow Hillsdale to do that.

and they seem to be doing just fine.

So here's the deal.

You're going to have to back your own loans with your $37 billion.

And you're going to be, the moral hazard is going to shift.

So if you want to offer all of these therapeutic courses, that's fine with us.

And if you want to have the average year of graduation

time spent to graduate go from four to six years, that's fine with us too.

But you're going to pay for it.

And we're going to have truth and lending legislation.

You know, I just bought a car and I had to sign about 27 pages of truth in lending about the car.

But we don't do that to students.

But

you're going to have to, from now on, tell students, this is the average number of years it's going to take to graduate from our school.

This is the amount of money you're going to pay with interest for tuition.

And this is the job market for each major that you take.

This is what you're going to tell every 18-year-old, see if you like it.

And then we're going to say to them, your schools of education have done a lot of damage, but we're going to do this.

We're going to tell every high school, and we're going to have national legislation, and we're going to urge it at the state level, that you can teach high school or in the public schools without a teaching credential if you have a one-year MA.

So just get a BA.

And then don't go over to the indoctrination school, but get another year of math or biology or French, and that'll give you complete qualifications, just like you were at the community college.

How absurd you can teach at a community college without a teaching credential if you have an MA, but you can't teach a senior in high school.

If you just had three or four of those reforms and you called those guys in,

they would shriek to high heaven, but they would act very quickly.

And that's what they need to do very quickly.

They could do it.

I think during the 2017 heyday, when Trump came in, he had the Senate and House.

And if you remember, the House Republicans passed that tax reform.

And one of the tax reforms is that state and local taxes could not be exempt if they were over $10,000.

I really got hurt on that.

A lot of people did.

Me too.

You did too.

Everybody did.

But it was considered untouchable.

And they did it.

And now it's just institutionalized.

And they won't change it because the left knows that wealthy leftists don't look very good wanting a tax cut.

Right.

That was the whole purpose of it.

But if they can do that,

they could tax endowments.

Yeah, there's this fight within philanthropy, Victor, is, you know, and you serve on a board of Bradley, is

the money's there to give away.

Is it there to give away, which kind of means give away now?

There's this whole question of, you know, should foundation sunset?

Or for many, it's about

we want to grow and be, there's this desire for permanence.

And the desire for for permanence kind of conflicts with the sense of charity and the immediacy of charity, you know, or I mean, charity in its broadest sense.

So, yeah, these colleges are

getting slightly forward.

They never want to balloon it, right?

You know,

I grew up in a family where my grandparents had never gone to college,

of course, and that nobody did in that era.

And so he mortgaged his farm to send his three daughters

mortgage it.

Imagine in 1939 and 1940 to send them to Stanford University and then to get advanced grids.

And then he had a daughter who was terribly crippled.

And he sent her to an industrial arts program at San Jose State so they would all have education because that was the promise that women that had education could be independent and they could help their husbands and they would be culturally this is what a farmer with no, just a high school degree believed in.

Everybody was like that.

That was the promise that, and then when we look at the engineering, we look at Stanford University's Silicon Trail Triangle, and we look at Turman and all of the great Stanford people who created that nexus between Silicon Valley and then the Stanford Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering.

We look at all these people.

The university was a wonderful place.

And now

they have taken it over, and it's an indoctrination

cultural revolutionary center.

And their whole purpose is deductive.

It's not to teach inductive thinking or empirical thinking.

It's to train people

with a central premise to then to fit everything they see in the university, make fit that overriding ideology.

And that overriding ideology is mandated equity or equality

and culpability if it is not apparent.

Historically, in the present, everything.

That's what they're there for, and they've ruined it.

And so they have to be brought to heal.

And I don't think that you just say, we're going to replicate you, although that's a very good anecdote, but you also have to say, we're going to force you to follow your original mandate.

And we can do it if we have.

One of the hopes that I have, and I think everybody would agree, is that we have a different Republican Party.

This is not the Republican Party of Mitt Romney and Bob Dole and John McCain, who believe that the purpose of a presidential candidate was to lose nobly with 46% of the vote or the Bushes.

So whether you hate Donald Trump or you like Donald Trump or you have no feelings for Donald Trump, There was a revolutionary process that surrounded him and the irredeemables and the deplorables.

I never thought in my lifetime, given the history of the Republican Party, that it would represent the working classes.

But when I grew up, the only people in my town that were Republicans were on the golf course.

It's just the way it was.

And all the working people were Democrats, Truman Democrats, JFK Democrats.

But now the Republican Party is a populist nationalist middle-class party, and the extreme wealthier are on the left.

So

you have the potential if they can get their act together and they can get a good ticket to really get elected and do something

because they represent the people.

And

that's never happened before with the Republican Party.

And in my view, it hasn't.

And the Democratic Party has made it easy to them because it's not the old Democratic Party of, not that, you know, it was not neo-socialist

under FDR, but there were were elements of it under JFK and Truman that were sort of bipartisan.

That doesn't exist anymore.

They're Jacobins.

They're hardcore revolutionaries.

Right.

I mean, revolutionary to the extent that men can be women and

et cetera, define reality.

The idea is that there's a binary in the United States, and it's 50% of the country.

is oppressed and 50% are the oppressors.

And we're going to identify the oppressors as white, male, Christian, heterosexual.

And they're the bad people.

And that's what we're going, that's the Democratic Party.

That's their ideology.

And so that's easy to refute.

Open borders, no punishment for crime,

Afghanistan pool, all that stuff is easy to refute if you have an alternative that's viable and practical.

But what I'm worried about, and we're going to talk about that in a future podcast because we're running out of time, is

can they get their act together and get a nominee and a ticket that unites and gets the 3% to 4% independent voter without losing the base?

Right.

Well,

and that's going to be so far.

Um,

everybody is worried that Donald Trump, as I said, is Gulliver and the Lilliputians have tied him down so much, he might not have freedom of action.

And then the alternatives to him have not emerged as the dynamic Reagan-esque candidates that would be necessary if he's not able.

So either one of two things has to happen.

Either Trump breaks out of his bonds and finds a legal strategy that allows him freedom of action and outsmarts his enemies and uses that empathy

to appeal to independence

and wins, or there's has to be an alternative to him that's viable.

And if that is, Joe Biden is very vulnerable.

And

it would be nice to see a year from now, Joe Biden facing an impeachment for all of these crimes his family has committed and all these purple state senators trying to argue in the Senate or these House members on his behalf.

It'll be kind of like 1974 when the Republican Party was forced to defend Richard Nixon.

My view, Richard Nixon was a babe in the woods compared to the things the Biden family's done.

And that wasn't very easy for them.

So things could really,

just to finish, things could really

work in

the Republicans' failure favor.

And they've got a very favorable Senate

opportunity.

They have less exposed seats than the Democrats.

And they could really win big.

And if they could win, they could really do something.

But they have to get organized and they have to be candid.

And they have to figure out their own new leadership also which is

they donald trump should say tomorrow i plan to be your nominee but if i'm not i i'm not going to bolt the party and i'm not going to tell the mega people to stay home they did that in 2008 and 2012 when we got john mccain and mitt romney or well he did it in georgia in the special election

in the special election essentially said not worth voting i want to be the nominee.

I want them.

But just as I don't want the independents to stay home, if I get nominated, and then Yunkin or DeSantis is going to have to say, I want to be the nominee and I will appeal to the base.

But if I don't get it, I'm not going to tell independents and suburban moms or whoever that stereotype 3% to 5% that the Republicans need.

And then they could cap it off by saying, we haven't had 51% of the popular votes since George Bush beat Michael de Kakis.

That was 1988.

So we're now into

well over, we're at 35 years.

We can't even get 51% of the vote.

We've lost seven now, the last eight popular votes at the national level.

So something's been wrong at the national level.

Even though we won 1,400 seats, legislative governorships

under Obama, he was a disaster for the Democratic Party.

So they need to say something has been wrong at the national level.

We have to unite around a conservative, a really conservative candidate.

And I think you could say that there's some conservative candidates out there.

And with that.

Okay.

Now, Victor, we have to bring this.

I know you're up a hill, so you got to do some lecturing or whatever.

But yeah, but let's bring this to the finish line.

We'll do that right after this final message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, just a quickie, and then we'll do our usual end of the show.

You said just a quickie.

What does that mean?

Well, that's

first of all, it's said in a quick in a Christian sense.

So, don't say that.

It's said in a Christian sense.

Yeah, yeah.

Darita, please, Dari.

As Louis said in Casablanca, I'm shocked.

I'm shocked.

Quickie's here.

Victor, tell us about your.

It's not easy to get to Hillsdale.

I've gone, I've been there twice.

You know, it's two hours from Detroit by car, maybe two hours.

So, but you, you got there.

You got there.

It's never easy to get anywhere from Fresno, as far as I know.

And tried that myself about 50 times in the last 10 years.

How was your, did you have any

travails that you could blame on Pete Boudige?

I have an

existential problem with LAX.

It's very hard.

And I got dropped off there at six.

And I waited.

No, it was about 6.30.

I waited two.

I wanted to get there early.

So that was my fault.

Okay.

But I was there three hours.

And then the flight, we had kind of a problem loading, but it had a tailwind.

I got here pretty early.

But I was just reflecting on my bad flights.

And those are mostly the case because just earlier, I went to go to a Bradley meeting in Milwaukee.

I went to to the airport as I said and nobody put the food on the plane the night before so the pilots said they were hungry so the pilots took off and said they had to go to Starbucks.

Then they came back and said we apologize and everybody said well we didn't get to eat and then they said we're going to go in a minute and they said oh we can't we roll down the window and it won't roll up and everybody said well you had the plane here all night.

And then they said, well, don't worry.

And they, of course, they told us things that were not true.

So for the next three hours, they didn't roll up the window.

They couldn't get anybody, and it was a four-hour delay.

Everybody missed their connection.

I just went home, and that happens a lot.

So, I decided there's a typology about air travel.

There's two types of, I've noticed this when I got on.

There's

two types of air travelers.

There's okay,

there's the air traveler who really is disabled and needs a wheelchair,

and that is 25% of the wheelchairs, and then there's 75%

of the people who want to get

overhead space.

And you can tell that because

my record is 17 wheelchairs.

And they go in.

The only thing I'm saying is they go in on the wheelchair, but if they have a connection, they've been cured in the mid-flight and they run out without taking a wheelchair.

Make their commission.

There are also two types of people loading.

I was watching them yesterday.

There's a type of people who are professional travelers, so they go in, they put their baggage overhead, and they know what they had to take out.

It takes two seconds.

And if they forgot something, they reach around almost

simian-like with a long arm and they open it up so they don't obstruct.

Then there's the other type of passenger.

They get right in the aisle.

They block the entire thing.

They're talking on their cell phone and they have no preparation.

And as they talk on their cell phone, they just put throw stuff out on their seat and they go through it and they hold everybody up.

And the airline has no,

there's another type of passenger.

There's the other type of passenger who says,

I am not in first class, so I have, I know there's not going to be enough carry-on.

So I've checked in my bags and I have a small carry-on.

I'm just going to go quickly in and put it on the seat.

And then there's the guy who's

he has a suitcase that's too big to be carry-on.

He brought a tuba with with him, right?

And a backpack, and he's sitting in the back seat.

And you're all ready to take off, and he's trying to shove all this stuff in, and it won't fit.

And then you stop, and then they have to go back.

So

that's a dichotomy.

And then there's the pilot, and there's dichotomies with the pilot.

There's the pathological liar pilot, and he says, we're going to be taking off in just a minute.

You know,

I'm sorry to say that the mechanic is not here, but it'll be about four minutes, an hour later.

It'll be about eight more minutes.

Just the mechanic didn't show up, so it'll be 15 more minutes.

The pathological liar pilot, Willie, and then there's the honest guy.

And he, I like those guys.

They kind of say, I cannot believe there's not a mechanic here.

It's going to be an hour and a half.

He tells you the truth.

And, you know, you're going to miss your connection.

And so those are two types of pilots.

And then

there's two types of passengers when they sit down i'm not going to give you the percentages

there's the person who

uh either has a prostate problem or urinary retention and they sit by the window so they have to get up every 15 minutes and you're in the aisle or uh there's a person who

I'm trying to be polite.

You ask me, there's the type of person who brings in like

a whole bag of food, and it's like half-eaten ham sandwiches, overdone fried chicken, and they put it all out there.

And it just, and here's my final one.

Right.

The zoology of

the glad you said zoology because a person got on my plane with two of the biggest Irish matching wolfhounds I've ever seen.

Seriously?

Yeah.

And a golden retriever.

It used to be little pekinees in boxes.

Yeah.

Dogs are huge.

And they go on the plane and they pass wind and they gnaw.

And five flights ago, a woman brought in a Springer Spaniel.

And that dog licked my ankle the whole time.

And you know what she said?

Isn't he cute?

He's so cute.

He really likes you.

And I said, he's licking my leg.

And she said, I know he loves to do that.

And I said very politely, would you mind if I licked his leg?

And she got really upset about that.

Rang in, and you know what?

I had been in, I was complaining to, because I don't really complain at all.

I just complained to an attendant.

Just on the podcast.

That's okay.

Yes, just I did, I release, I vent the podcast.

But I said to a person in Chicago,

I said, you know, this is getting out of hand.

And she said, well, at least they don't have a miniature horse.

I said, what do you mean?

She said, we've had a miniature horse on the plane.

He's about the size of a wolf, you know, a big dog.

They have all sorts of weird animals.

I thought they didn't let,

you know what they do also?

They put this thing service dog.

Right.

And these two people that had these wolfhounds, service dog, they were perfectly fine.

And you know what service dog means?

I get tense on planes, so I don't believe in value.

I believe in pets.

And the pets, the only problem with that, the pets get nervous too.

And I guess they give them some type of what constipating drug before they go on the plane, but it doesn't seem to work because I've seen pets urinate on the in the I don't know when they allowed that to happen.

We all know this is a racket, this service animal thing.

And someone tried to bring a service peacock on a plane once, at least that was

birds, no, no, they have birds.

I've seen service birds, oh my god, parakeets and stuff.

So they need to, they need to stop that out.

It's not, and the final thing I'm going to say, and we'll quit, is

it's like the Greyhound bus now.

When I was a kid, the first flight I ever took was 1971 as i said to yale and everybody you know it was a united flight three quarters and that time it was there was no uh security you just went straight to the gate right and you got on and everybody on there was properly dressed they had ties and sport coats and or they were it it was just amazing and so i was on this flight yesterday and they should have certain rules of decorum that no one that weighs over 250 pounds should be allowed to wear yoga pants or spandex.

There must have been 10 people like that with no boxer, I mean, no cutoffs or anything, just skin-tight women that weighed 250 to 300 in spandex.

Oh, you could see Paris.

And then they shouldn't allow people to go in like...

they've just been running five miles in sweatpants, you know?

They just come in there with sweatpants.

They should allow people, no, they should at least say they have to wear some kind of socks.

They just come in with thongs.

And so it's really raunchy now the way they come in with all this food.

And it's, it reminds me when I was a kid,

if my car broke down from Santa Cruz as a student and it did a lot, I had to take a

Greyhound bus.

And that's what it was.

It was just,

well, now airline travel is like the Greyhound bus.

And it's too bad, but it's,

there's no rules or regulations.

So that's my rant well that's a it's a appropriate rant and uh yeah it works and i will tell you this and this is an endorsement i have traveled every airline i fly a lot and i have come to the conclusion if i was going to rank the airlines delta is number one american is number two and united is number 100.

We will not be getting any advertising from United.

No, which is fine.

United is the flight that I waited four hours because there was one baggage carrier, one guy on loading the plane in Chicago.

Then when we were ready to go, we got out in the plane and lightning hit.

We all had to go back.

And then we were finally leaving to Fresno four hours late and they got over Denver and they said, we're sorry, we don't have enough fuel in the tank.

for this plane to get out of Fresno tomorrow.

So we're just going to make a five-minute detour to Denver right below us and fill up.

And that was four hours.

And they lied.

And every time I'm on United, it's a disaster.

And every time I'm on Delta, it's only a semi-disaster.

And it's much,

it's tolerable.

And with that, we'll stop.

All right.

Okay, Victor, I recommend

not getting on a plane in the next week.

I know you're up at Hillsdale.

I have to get back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, let me just read this as we thank our listeners.

And here's one comment that we

found on Victor's website, Blade of Perseus.

It's from Anonymous.

And it's,

I love the podcast, especially the part about the farmer.

I think this is in reference to your recent discussion with Sammy about the health of farmers.

I grew up on a ranch in Saskatchewan, Canada, and married a farmer rancher from Texas.

That lifestyle was very difficult, built a lot of character and fortitude, having nothing but respect for the producers in our country and Canada.

grateful to be retired now but more grateful for all the lessons and skills and strength i received from that life thank you for acknowledgement to our farmers thank you anonymous amen to that never there's no no more noble people than farmers yeah um victor thanks for all the wisdom you shared today and um lucky kids up there young men and women at hillsdale they're gonna it's a wonderful place hillsdale i'm very i'm always happy to come here good Good.

Well, thanks, Victor.

Good talking to you.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much.